Executive Order 8802 barely improved black defense-industry employment or pay

Evidence

Legally, the defense industry was supposed to include both black and white Americans; in 1941, President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in the government and the defense industry. But it rarely did in practice—in the ten weeks after the Executive Order became law, Boeing hired one thousand new employees each week, but none were black. Eventually, the Executive Order did help increase the share of black Americans working in the defense industry from 3 percent to 8 percent, although the jobs were lower paying than those held by white employees. (Marginal economic progress of some blacks in the workforce during this period may explain, in part, the increase in black homeownership rates.) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 192

Legally, the defense industry was supposed to include both black and white Americans; in 1941, President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in the government and the defense industry. But it rarely did in practice—in the ten weeks after the Executive Order became law, Boeing hired one thousand new employees each week, but none were black. Eventually, the Executive Order did help increase the share of black Americans working in the defense industry from 3 percent to 8 percent, although the jobs were lower paying than those held by white employees. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 192

Categorization

• SHARE: Boeing hiring 1,000 a week for ten weeks with zero Black hires is a killer anecdote for anyone writing about 20th-century labor and racial exclusion.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 192